


The Hybrid in the Hourglass

by ChromaticDreams



Series: Doctor Who One-Shots [7]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bonus chapter... containing, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Kissing, Missing Scene, My take on the missing scene with the Doctor and Clara in the cloisters, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, well- if you ship whouffaldi that is XD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromaticDreams/pseuds/ChromaticDreams
Summary: “Between one heartbeat and the last is all the time I have. People like me and you, we should say things to one another. And I'm going to say them now. In... in the only way I can."The Doctor always knew those big sad eyes would one day be his undoing.~What happened in those cloisters, in the moments the Doctor forgot?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Three years on. Three years, and I haven't stopped thinking about what might have happened in this missing scene. I have no idea how many people have tackled this concept before, but wanted to offer my personal take on how I envision it. A big thank you to Lee, who offered me much needed screaming and peer pressure to get this out of my head and into words.
> 
> Enjoy!

The Doctor always knew those big sad eyes would one day be his undoing.  
  
He knew it centuries back in Victorian London, at their star-crossed beginning, and he only knows those eyes all the better now. His words hang in the air around them like the scent of musk in the damp of the cloisters. And truly, the sheer impassioned intensity of her gaze— the glistening emotion encapsulated like whole galaxies within her irises— is all he needs to understand implicitly that his sentiment is fully reciprocated.  
  
_I have a duty of care...!_  
  
He tries in futility to avert his attention to other matters, rambles on about how the hatch opens up to corridors that will lead them to the workshops, where they’ll have TARDISes. Still, his best friend’s eyes press into him, so tangible as if on its own a form of physical contact. It’s yet another source of dizzying stimuli, alongside the faint vibrations of the Matrix around him and the unsettling sense of time under decay, yet another reason he’s woefully lost without her hand safe in his. In his anger and grief he lies to everyone, but he can never play pretend with her for long, never. Not truly. No matter how hard he tries.  
  
The dread of words left unspoken eventually grows too palpable for the pair of them. Clara shifts closer, her expression still malfunctioning, caught in the quantum space between one emotion and the next.  
  
“Okay, listen. I have something I need to say.”  
  
“We do not have time,” he says, waving her off, the feeling of the clock ticking down to zero intrinsically imminent in his bones.  
  
“No, my _time-!"_ she cries, commanding his attention. “My time is _up._ Doctor...”  
  
And the yearning in her tone tugs at him, chipping away at the diamond mountains he’s erected around his soul, stripping it bare in mere seconds to place it face to face with hers.  
  
“Between one heartbeat and the last is all the time I have. People like me and you, we should say things to one another. And I'm going to say them now. In-“  
  
Her breath audibly hitches. The Doctor’s unsure when her hand first brushes along his cheek, tracing over rough hewn trenches and memorizing every last contour. Every last hard won wrinkle, a testament to the remnants of personal history dancing ever so further beyond his reach.  
  
“-In the only way I can,” she finishes, and he’s hurt— like a physical kick to his side— that it almost sounds like an apology.  
  
~~_But an apology for what she’s going to say, or that she didn’t say it earlier?_ ~~  
  
And before his mind can turn to utter anything in response, Clara finally crosses that long unspoken boundary between them— smashes it, a bloodied fist right to that last remaining crystal facet— and presses her lips flush against his.  
  
It’s not a hesitant kiss she offers, that much he’s certain of, but it’s slow. Deliberate— a kiss fully aware of how the sand’s rapidly running empty in their hourglass, but refusing to let this fickle measure act as a limit. His hearts constrict, every sense ablaze. As sure as the spin of his home planet underfoot, he feels it all: The faint scent of perfume, a day old but still evident on her skin. The sensation of her warm, unweathered lips moving against his mildly chapped ones. The full cyclical harmony of her path through the universe, her time stream, which flares out around them like the petals of a flower in bloom. Like the rarest of the rare among the wide universe, part of a genus that only spreads its seed once in a millennium. And so, as if second nature, ~~_(and it really should’ve been),_~~ __the Doctor reciprocates in kind. He parts his mouth, breathing her air— walking her Earth, _their_ Earth, together— and willfully losing himself within the intoxicating depth of her embrace.  
  
It’s sacred, and it’s forever, and then it’s over.  
  
She parts from him, sights deftly flicking up from his lips to his soul’s window.  
  
“You are _my_ universe,” she promises. “Always have been. Always will.”  
  
He gazes at her, eyes glistening, going all wide and puffy like how hers always did, malfunctioning in her wake.  
  
“Oh-!” he breathes, the sheer weight of memory of their little eternity finally breaching the surface, physically forced into being through wordless utterance. His fingers gloss across her cheek with the care of a proffered brush against alabaster canvas. “My Clara...”  
  
And the taste of her name is cream and spice and whispers of everything that ever could be on his tongue, a prayer to a faceless god. He’s not religious, or at least doesn’t consider himself to be, but if he were to level his devotion on anyone— if he believes in anything, he believes in her. Deftly, his hand lifts her chin. Adoration shines through her every feature, and it leaves him weak, rather like an exposed nerve. He imparts a second kiss— quick and chaste, a wax seal upon parchment- and then presses his forehead to hers.  
  
“Listen.” Clara‘s eyelids flutter shut as she leans against him. “I know what you’re thinking, what you feel. And I know-!” she interjects his move to protest, likely feeling the muscles of his arms tense under her hands. “How much this must hurt you. I’m not saying I don’t understand why you chose what you did, because in your place I would-“

Her voice fades out. He’s let her soul rest in his head intimately enough by this point that he knows without conferring or tapping into her thoughts what she’s reflecting on: Trenzalore, his since aborted grave, and all the days long centuries past. Her bravery there, a reckless sacrifice in love’s name. His Impossible Girl, scattering herself into fragments, living millions of lives moment to moment, and all this to die saving him at every bend.

Placed in his shoes, in a bespoke torture chamber with 4.5 billion years’ separation from the one thing left in this universe worth fighting for?

_Would_ isn’t even a question.

Her lips curve into a tight smile as she leans back on her haunches, leaves his embrace. Their hands find each other’s, lithe digits intertwining like a silent waltz. Taking a deep breath, she rephrases her previous words.  
  
“In your place, I chose exactly the same. But you. If you care for me, then you’ll let me care for you. If I’m really dead, if you can’t do anything. If this is... my end. You need to move on.”

The Doctor feels the precise second his gut flips, shifts from emergent flutters of hope back to the churning maelstrom of loss and grief he thought he left behind in the extraction chamber, and it’s whiplash. His fingers grasp her palm with invigorated intensity— rebuking the universe’s design, begging time, begging _her—_ but the pained look etched within her brow and reflected in her glossy eyes only reaffirms his fears.

Her grip loosens.  
  
“You need to let me go.”

“I can’t just-“  
  
_“Dead!"_ she exclaims in a whisper, tears spilling from their perch. “Doctor, all you’re talking to is a ghost of who I was. And I- I don’t want to keep trudging through some half realized existence if my heart’s never going to beat again.”

“And what if- what if, just maybe, I told you I could fix that?" And he almost hates how vulnerable he sounds in the moment, his voice hitching against his better wishes. "Take you away with me, restart your pulse?”  
  
Gently, he cups her cheek, swabbing his thumb across to wipe away the tears that linger there, running in rivulets across too-pale skin.

“Oh, you know me,” Clara scoffs with a feeble laugh, words flowing thick in the weight of all she's endured. She leans into his hand, finally breaks a smile. Oh, that radiant smile... “What’d you think?”  
  
“All of time and space?”  
  
He flashes his own grin back, noting the way it stretches so unnaturally across his lips after so many billions of years of memory gone by. Inwardly he wonders if she also notices how strained and half-hearted it was, just how feeble his facade really can be. And so when she throws her arms around him and burrows her face in his neck, hides away from him as she desperately suppresses her sobs of relief, he doesn't grouse. Not this time. After all his years, he understands.

Eventually, she leans up and presses a kiss against his cheek, at the corner of his mouth. Her eyes are still puffy, still red and stained with throes of anguish. But still Clara. Still beautiful. She sits back, sniffles a little, and rubs the last evidence of her sorrow away. 

“You have a plan, then?”  
  
The Doctor, pointedly ignoring the incompleteness of his Plan A and the terrifying reality of his Plan B currently nestled just inside his jacket pocket, traces a wide arc of the circular Gallifreyan inscribed into the stone hatch. “Oh, obviously. When don’t I?”  
  
“Just about every other day," she says, deadpan.

At first he scowls with offense at the jab, but knowing deep down she's right softens his expression into one of fondness.   
  
Clara watches in momentary silence as he works. The hatch beneath them hums with an ancient lifeblood, emitting a myriad series of trills and dull chimes as he unlocks each layer one by one, aided by his telepathic ability. Each fingertip moves methodically in turn, forging physical contact with specific points in the complex sigils just like the ridges on a key— just like the Matrix itself showed him over two thousand years ago, when he was but a fresh-eyed boy ignorant of the days to come. His concentration is interrupted by a familiar warmth settling over his busy hands, coercing them to slow their frenzied endeavor.  
  
“So this brilliant plan of yours... Does it require any immediate assistance?”  
  
“Ah, yes actually," he admits, glancing up from her hand atop his to her fragile visage of courageousness. Memorizes this moment, burns it into his memory so that he'll never forget it, the sum of her bravery and her never-giving-up. "I could use your help on one thing. I need you to stage a distraction.”  
  
“For?”  
  
“Our pals watching from the edge, there. If we’re going to escape this hell, they can’t see me open this hatch.”  
  
“Don’t worry,” she whispers, brushing her thumb across the hair on his knuckles. “They’ll all be looking at me.”


	2. Extra: Podfic!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finished my podfic of this!  
> I wanted to podfic it from the beginning, so I'm glad I finally got it done. There's some backing music, and I mixed in a bit of actual dialogue. (Mostly for Twelve where I could, since it just felt wrong for me, a higher voiced individual, to even try to match the amount of gravitas he has. For Clara, I could match her cadence pretty okay.)
> 
> I've never tried anything like this before and to be honest I have no idea what the podficing standards are. Anyways, I hope it's enjoyable! Feel free to let me know what you think if you listen.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very appreciated! I always love hearing what my readers have to say. <3


End file.
